Real estate agents need to juggle multiple tasks regularly, so having a solid customer relationship management (CRM) tool makes things infinitely more manageable.
If you’re thinking about using Follow Up Boss as your CRM, then you’ve come to the right place.
Before you make a decision, it’s best to know more about them. What features they offer, the drawbacks you might face, as well as pricing.
Well, we’re going to look at all of that in our Follow Up Boss review for real estate.
Do you want to know if it’s the one for YOU? Let’s find out!
About Follow Up Boss
Follow Up Boss has been in business for 10 years. Dan Corkill and Tom Markow launched it in 2011.
They maintain their headquarters in San Francisco, California, but their people work remotely. It’s the way they’ve done business, even before the pandemic hit.
Since its birth, Follow Up Boss has handled more than 5 million leads for over 20,000 real estate professionals.
Corkill and Markow designed the software specifically for the real estate industry, and it reflects in the available features and the services they provide.
Unlike other CRM providers who position themselves as an all-in-one system, Follow Up Boss opted to focus on CRM alone.
This strategy comes with its own set of benefits and drawbacks, which we’ll be covering here.
Follow Up Boss Features
Follow Up Boss has remained one of the most favored CRMs in real estate. And it’s thanks to these features:
- Intuitive and uncomplicated platform
- Solid user support
- Team features
Let’s look at them one by one.
Intuitive and Uncomplicated Platform
Follow Up Boss understands that real estate agents will spend a LOT of their time on the platform. So to help out, they designed it to ensure you’ll have a great experience.
The layout is consistently clean, attractive, and well-designed. Whether you’re viewing your dashboard or browsing the reporting area, the platform remains logical and intuitive.
Even if you’ve never used a CRM before, you won’t have difficulty navigating Follow Up Boss’s CRM. They made sure the main functions of the platform like Inbox, People, Calendar, Deals, and Reporting are easy to spot.
Solid User Support
Whether you’re still in your trial period or already a paid user, you’ll never be left unsupported with Follow Up Boss.
They don’t wait until you become a paid user before reaching out. They have onboarding specialists who ideally call new customers within 24 hours of them signing up.
Their objective is to help you set up your system the way you want it.
If you prefer to learn on your own, Follow Up Boss offers several options for self-paced learning. These include access to a boot camp webinar, staring guide articles, and a getting started video series on YouTube.
If, after some time, you find yourself in need of help, you can reach out to their support team seven days a week, between 8 am to 8 pm EST.
Teams Features
You can assign leads to team members in a variety of ways. You can do a round-robin to distribute it evenly. You can also opt to use specific criteria to determine which agent can best handle a prospective client, such as lead source or type.
The upgraded version of the system allows you to follow up and monitor your team’s task completion. You can use this to ensure no leads fall through the cracks and to provide support if and when someone needs it.
What’s more, Follow Up Boss automatically sends out text messages to your agents as new leads are assigned. No one can say they didn’t know they had additional clients put in their pipeline.
Follow Up Boss Drawbacks
Before you get ahead of yourself, take note that there’s a drawback to a platform that focuses solely on one tool.
If you’re looking for a CRM that allows you to do customer relationship management, transaction management, and marketing efforts, you might be disappointed.
The main drawback to Follow Up Boss is that it has few additional features.
Few additional features
Other CRMs allow you to do different types of activities to help boost your real estate business.
Follow Up Boss only focuses on its core product — the CRM. Although they consciously chose this direction, it led to the loss of several features such as:
Transaction Management
Since real estate transactions can be complex, you can take a lot of pressure off your shoulders by using a platform that does transaction management.
This feature allows you to put your process into workflows, including all details and every action you manage in every transaction step.
Follow Up Boss’s Deals function serves as its transaction management page. It’s easy to use, but it’s not as intricate as other systems.
The setup is like a Kanban Board, and you can drag and drop cards from one column to another, depending on where they are in your pipeline. This is the extent of Follow Up Boss’s transaction management.
You may use a separate Online Transaction Management Platform (OTMP) if you want all your actions captured and turned into workflows and checklists. If you go in this direction, though, you may find yourself redoing some activities (like encoding contact information in two systems).
Drip Campaigns
A drip campaign is a series of emails sent out over a specified period. A CRM with this feature allows you to send out messages automatically in specific intervals. You don’t need to worry about new content regularly or manually sending it to your contacts list because everything is predetermined.
It’s one of the most cost-effective ways to market your real estate business.
Unfortunately, Follow Up Boss doesn’t offer a lot of drip campaigns — you may find their template insufficient for your requirements.
Follow Up Boss Pricing
You can choose from three available subscriptions for Follow Up Boss — Grow, Pro and Platform:
- Grow. If you’re a solo agent or have a team of 3 to 5 agents, you may want to start with Grow. It costs less than $70 per user per month.
- Pro. As your team expands, you’ll get to the point wherein it’ll be more cost-effective to upgrade to a Pro plan. It costs under $500 per month and accommodates up to ten users. Any user over ten costs an additional amount per month.
- Platform. For bigger teams, you may want to consider Follow Up Boss’s Platform plan. Its monthly rate comes to about $1,000 and covers up to 30 users. In terms of CRM features, there are no additional tools in this plan that you don’t already have access to in Pro. Users in excess of 30 are charged $20 per head each month.
If you want to save up a bit, you can go for annual billing. Follow Up Boss recomputes the rates so that you’ll get two months free. It may be a little heavy on the pocket, though, since you’ll have to pay in one go.
Wrapping It All Up
All in all, Follow Up Boss is a solid choice for a CRM.
It explains why this CRM is so popular with real estate agents.
Although it doesn’t have the best transaction manager or marketing features, its CRM delivers what you need and more.
Ultimately, you’ll have to decide whether you’re comfortable with what Follow Up Boss can offer (which is a lot)!